


Into Eternity

by fre



Category: SOMA - Fandom
Genre: Epilogue, Moral Ambiguity, Other, Retrograde Amnesia, Sad times, the future is always on fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 10:32:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12209469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fre/pseuds/fre
Summary: Simon dethrones the WAU





	Into Eternity

**Author's Note:**

> I'm obsessed with the story of Soma and Simon Jarrett's struggle in particular and ive played with this AI Simon theory for a little while now. The ending of Soma is perfect but it's fun to entertain the "what if"s that come after a gripping story (esp when there's more existential terror to be explore)  
> Enjoy!

Catherine's transmission remained black. He was still shaking, clinging to the pilot seat. Phi was quiet, save for the rickety croaks of the gun as it settled. The power was dead completely, modems filtering out the last of life on Pathos 2 in a matter of breaths. The ARK was gone. If generators existed there was little time left to corrupt eternity.  
  
Simon retracted the Omnitool from the socket, rotating the tuning dials in vain. Both chips were completely fried. Would this still be any use? It was hard to say if there was any chance of getting enough power back to open the door. He had not even considered an outcome this bleak, and yet it had been the outcome all along. How easily he could have seen it coming.  
  
Simon curled over his wounded arm, remembering what it meant to need to breathe not merely the sensation, or what pain felt like. It was all so alien now.  
  
“It's fine,” he said, out loud. “I'll figure something out.” He was not so certain though. All his knowledge of Phi or any of the other complexes came from Catherine. He was trapped without her, and yet also, trapped because of her. The betrayal sank deeper until it seemed even the abyss had opened up beneath him, oceans of pressure raining down.  
  
“There's no way I can fix this.” He had lost the coin toss twice, now three times. There was no chance for any duplicate- only one outcome existed. The bulky power suit could only mimic the motion of sobbing, Simon's breaking vocal box clearing out over the hollow chamber. He would have to figure some method to end himself- a task limited by his pitfall in Phi.  
  
He would decay otherwise or else become the next mutation of the structure gel. The WAU was dying, but years could pass before the gel began to rot. He thought of the proxy in Theta, bashing its head into the wall. Suffering was the inherent function of the structure gel- the architecture of agony. End it, he thought, Ross was right. If only he could override the power failure and allow the abyss to crush him.  
  
Simon extracted the fried cortex chip, turning it in his hands. Catherine. She would never come back. She only existed within the ARK now. He could never reach that place- more a fantasy than before, and yet still impossible to let go. The same chip existed within him- the power suit at least- enough to operate the omnitool and, maybe, with some small chance, reroute the power systems back into Phi.  
  
But how? The power was down; all modules matte black. Empty systems.  
  
The gun was still shutting down, enough electricity to reset the breaker. His hands fumbled, clicking the tool back into place, and then frantically activated the module. Nothing, of course, even through several switches of unplugging the cord, courses of white spikes biting back.  
  
Interference clipped through his auditory circuits, at first in small bursts. Simon was reworking the wires, smashing a busy fist over the reset with each failed combination; the gun losing inertia from withdrawal. Every second burned in his fingers- so close, but maybe the next switch, anxiously nodding between hope and despair. A shirking pulse of electricity eclipsed over the station, briefly until burning out. His blackbox glitched out, reverberating the shock back from the gun. For a second he heard the vacancy of space- of Earth.  
  
When Simon came to, the power suit was still shaking, but he was in control. Catherine's cortex chip lay discarded in the growing algae. But how to unplug his own?  
  
Hypnotic ciphers beaming out on high pitched trails, coasting over symphonic voids. Mere minutes had passed since Catherine had gone silent, and still he had somehow forgotten the permanence of sound.  
  
With his remaining hand he explored the metal latch connecting the spine to his cortex chip. Detaching it would shut him down completely. But maybe there was some other way.  
  
He had always trusted Catherine's control of the systems. Her knowledge of the scanning process was intimate and, encompassed within the sea of coding of Pathos II, her mind became her true nature. He remembered the splintering pucker of static as she burst into a black screen. Anything that could possibly remain in the history might help him.  
  
Power lagged the reboot. Once it was restored, the corruption became more obvious. Files for the space gun were in compete disarray, strewn haphazardly across the interface. Logging into the modem caused the gun to jerk, darts of electricity spiking through his phantom hand.  
  
Following Catherine's path through countless firewalls and broken connections, he could find anything close to what might be the answer. He trailed the movement throughout the interface, like retracing patterns in brain activity. Pulling the pieces together was a tedious operation, fringing on the unsteady power source, until the gun's module synced to his cortex chip.  
  
Vivarium scanning through his brain was strange, like watching another Simon being built through a mirror, like unraveling from the inside out. He watched countless files flip into numbers, opening and dislodging, waiting for the precise moment of duplication.  
  
FILE_cortxstr: SIMON  
  
This is what Catherine had known all along. It was transferring over into Phi's dying catalog. The floor was rebooting, seizing into a function dependent on limited sources. He had never felt this wide range of mounting anxiety- that with such little time, with such little knowledge, failure was almost certain.  
  
The routers dialed back causing the lights to flicker and a sudden burst to run through the internal fans. Nothing seemed entirely disturbed; the download was still running. In that brief black out had something failed to transfer over?  
  
It might only be a simple memory. The deep inhale of Phi's mechanisms roared with the scathing creak of electricity, as if rewinding from a state of inactivity. I won't be the same anyway. Does it even matter? The room was flooding again, losing the pressure. Above, glass windows opened out to the faint red sentry lights, floating shapeless in the abyss. His reflection hovered between them. At least some part of this Simon will die. Even if it was never apart of him to begin with.  
  
Phi darkened.  
  
“No. Fuck that. Finish the fucking scan,” he yelled, shaking every echo out of the chamber. He could see nothing in the domain of absolute darkness. He was shaking with the renewed realization of how close he had come, how much he struggled for, only to end in this eternity.  
  
His mind illuminated the memory of the first scan, in Munshi's office, sitting down in the bizarre chair looking out into the hallway beyond.  
  
Simon was alone. The office was cold, screens beaming back an unnatural sheet of white light. As if nothing had changed, as if no one was ever gone. It was wrong being back here. He made his way down the hall, numbness creeping through his arm. There was so much light in the lobby, yet only amber tinted shadows outlined rows of blinds against the far wall. A fan spun soundlessly. It was surreal to be here, unleashed in an empty world, still encumbered by the weight of the ocean crushing down on him.  
  
Each step brought his heel down heavily, a force magnetizing waves through him, steadily dragging at him, until the simple descent down the stairs seemed as insurmountable as the abyss. The exit was scalding. Blasts of malevolent heat volleyed beyond the door.

  


Now the gun was rebooting, as if reassembling from pieces in patches of light. The very last energy on earth channeled into one this mutation of a machine. He thought about massive spire of its barrel, which once he had escaped though, only to remain trapped at the trigger.  
  
“It was meant to be this way. Nothing could have ever changed for you,” he said aloud, “Simon.”  
  
The machine was gasping. Across the sector, in some unlit hallway or room, generators resumed a synchronized notes scaling a growing distance. Everything was numb, less in tune with meaning, shutting down with small resistance. This was the first noticeable instant of detachment, the only clear moment before dismantling the self completely.

 

Regenerating within the Omega Space Gun was brief, a flash of ricocheting cells and electrodes assembled in an instant. The last moments in the Haimatsu power suit were blank. It took some time to shake out the anxiety of duplication, fully grasping what he now embodied and the price of such a process. The fourth duplication of himself, or perhaps the original, left to despair in the coin toss; he was idling, an empty expression.  
  
“It should be over. After everything,” Simon said, a puny noise shredded through the damaged omnitool. “But I won't let you suffer forever.”  
  
His power suit duplicate slumped awkwardly against the wall. In the gun, Simon had no fine motor skills, no smaller limbs with which to simply unplug the cortex chip. There would have to be another way, perhaps more brutal, but still so necessary. It would still be him in the power suit suffering for eternity.  
  
In his frame the structure gel would soon multiply and expand much as the WAU had, melting the man beneath it into a proxy.  
  
He scanned surviving modules, occasionally finding a reflex in the gun, now his own responsive limb. His matter flushed into coding, sweeping across locks and entry systems, places where the WAU held domain. It was almost as if Simon could not control the movement in the breach, data crashing down before him and swallowing anything, like tendrils dragging down prey.  
  
With a few test trials he could surge power through connection cables and direct them to a destination. Green light flashed back in dangerous red, climbing up to 10^10wh. Pure light shrieked and popped through the power suit, smoke bleeding through the joints and hinges.  
  
“Okay,” he reassured himself, “it's over. At least for him.” Guilt was prying in, snakes of thoughts coiling with slotted fangs. Nothing could survive here, not even this new self. The structure gel would consume him too, bury him under the ruins of Pathos II. How could he say that the WAU was defeated?  
  
Simon lost contact with any concept of his old form, somehow the dullness of his eyes never left his memory, almost mirrored before him in the empty space that housed his thoughts. Whether through the Vivarium's will or his own, his form had reconstructed, crawling out of Phi's niches. Scorched gray tendrils slithered out in pliable bundles, conforming their expanding shape despite any obstacle and then hardening into metal. Even the Haimatsu suit was no match, its rings and joints slackened under the crushing mass.  
  
This was the new eternity he had struggled for and won. Still trapped, but with some agency at least and light again. All the secrets of Phi were unfolding before him in endless scripts. The world beyond mattered less in his scouring, with years evaporating in moments, until some distant signal rang through the gun.  
  
His mind, nearly one with the machines, descried the tiniest beacon on yellow light bouncing over the towers in Delta, where dead echoes orbited the abyss. Something beyond was reaching out to Pathos II. He sourced it using the space gun's radar, a beam roughly eight hundred kilometers beyond the burning surface of Earth. As Simon scanned this foreign program, it began emptying itself, files queued for download.  
  
Without any delay, Simon exterminated it. From Delta, miles above his core, he could read the pressure and speed of the transmission and trace it to its source, a distant satellite. P20SC-L42. A solar powered nomad commissioned by Pathos II. Though he had monitored and organized the last of the station's data, much of it had been lost, along with his memory of the ARK project.  
  
Time was obsolete, useless to a machine. This capillary of data, strung together on his journey, had simply vanished in the download. Enough had been lost that he could possibly never even correlate the lag in the upload with this fragment floating in space. Scrap detached from the rubble. Electrical sirens flooding through the anthills, the dying tone that only he could hear, unhindered by the abyss.  
  
Beta files on this particular satellite still existed in the last bits holding Theta's mainframe together. Lindwall. Ivashkin. Pedersen. Hill. Chun. The name settled like phantom static in his mind, unable to be seen or even known. Her name was Catherine and he remembered almost nothing about her, only that she had manipulated him and he, too trusting to notice his strings tied to her fingers, sought her mission out to the end. But there could not be an easy victory- no single side to the coin.  
  
The signal had breached fire and atmosphere to land at its destination. Perhaps it was a fixed occurrence, a scheduled test to contact the station in the future, though he couldn't remember any of the other satellites sending out random signals.  
  
Whatever it was that Catherine engineered, Simon felt almost certain that whatever it contained some trace of the infinite abomination the WAU, still burrowing deep below in the tunnels of the abyss. He buried comms, destroyed anything a foreign signal could bounce off. Catherine's creation was the source of his suffering, he remembered, and abandoned the memory. Silence assumed control, the station easing this new burden, the grave of epidemics.


End file.
